Enterprise software systems receive, generate, and store data related to many aspects of a business enterprise. This data may relate to sales, customer relationships, marketing, supplier relationships, inventory, human resources, and/or finances. Users operate reporting tools to access such data and display the data in useful formats, such as graphic visualizations.
Reporting tools may interact with a semantic layer defining a set of abstract entities known as business objects. Each business object associates one or more physical entities (e.g., a physical database table, associated columns of one or more database tables, etc.) of one or more enterprise data sources with user-friendly names. Business objects may be classified as dimensions, along which one may want to perform an analysis or report (e.g., Year, Country, Product), or measures (e.g., Sales, Profit), whose values can be determined for a given combination of dimension values.
Some conventional reporting tools receive user-submitted queries including dimensions and measures (e.g., Sales by Country), and present one or more visualizations (e.g., bar graph, pie chart, geo-chart) of a corresponding result set. It may be beneficial to display visualizations additional related result sets which may be of interest to the user. However, determination of appropriate queries and generation of such visualizations may require expertise and creativity which the user does not possess.